DallasGuy75219

Like my $240 upgrade from a balcony to a 2 bedroom Grand Suite on Explorer of the Seas in January. Of course I kept my mouth shut in the Suite Lounge.

How is that different from the current practice of charging high prices for the nicest suites? Princess will charge what the market will bear, and in the long run those with the biggest wallets will still get the nicest cabins. Under your logic Princess should sell those nicest suites for less than the market price to give people with the smallest wallets a chance at them too. If you were Princess is that how'd you'd run your business? Of course not; this is capitalism, not a charity.

Practically every cruise line does this now, either by bidding or offering guaranteed paid upgrades to targeted booked cruisers. The upgrade fairy is now the upsell fairy. If you owned a business with a limited amount of inventory, (i.e., desirable unsold cabins), would you give it away for free or sell it to customers willing to pay for it.

The instructions on the envelope are to go the Priority Line at Guest Services, so someone wouldn't be waiting in a massive line. If your card was tampered with they would give you a new folio number so that any fraudulent charges would be isolated to your old folio and Carnival would not charge those to your account.

The stewards close the cabin door once the room is ready and don't (or at least are not supposed to) put the S&S cards out until the time when rooms are officially ready.

The tickets for your excursion will be left in your room. Each ticket shows the meeting time and place for the excursion.

Yes, always people drinking wine from water goblets in the MDR. And the water goblets in the cabins are different from those in the MDR so they know you're drinking the vodka and soda you mixed in your room, not ice water. I buy the wine packages anyway but I'm always sure to bring my wine glass back to my cabin after dinner.

Yes, but TBH it was probably more about Carnival's bottom line than the improved passenger experience. Over the course of thousands a check-ins for a sailing, those minutes shaved off of each check-in add up to multiple agents no longer needed to work check-in. And it preserved the value of FTTF so people kept buying it vs. going to their cabin early anyway since they already had their S&S card.

Or airline miles if you have them, since most airlines stopped charging to redeposit miles if you cancel an award reservation. That's what I did for my Australia cruise in October. Carnival's Australia restart had been pushed back so many times that I wasn't taking a chance on buying a non-refundable airline ticket. Refundable tickets to Australia are obscenely expensive, and Carnival's version of EZAir doesn't even sell flights from the US to Australia. So I booked with miles so I could get them refunded if Carnival cancelled my sailing (again).

Keep in mind all the guests who never rebooked using their FCC until this week when they knew they could cruise without being vaccinated (i.e., the reason booking activity doubled from 2019 on August 15). The decision to take FCC vs. a refund for a canceled cruise was irrevocable, I'm sure a lot of the anti-vax crowd were later kicking themselves after taking FCC because (1) they didn't expect cruises to be on pause for over a year and (2) they had no way of knowing most would initially have to be vaccinated to sail after cruises restarted. Unrelated to the change in protocols, I happened to have booked two cruises this week, and my PVP said he's been slammed with people booking their first post-restart cruises now that most itineraries don't require vaccination.

There are too many risks and uncertainties associated with cruising in the COVID era for anyone to meaningfully give you the reassurance you desire. Anyone who tries to give you that reassurance is just telling you what you want to hear. If Princess couldn't or wouldn't provide that reassurance, that's a sign that no one else can or should either. If this uncertainty is too much for you, I would suggest getting a refund instead of rebooking and waiting to cruise until the operating environment for cruises is more certain.

That's the workaround... fill your glass in your cabin and your waiter has no way of knowing if you stopped at a bar on the way to dinner or poured it in your cabin.

You don't have to turn it over. You can serve it yourself but your waiter may or may not charge you corkage, whether they see you drinking from a bottle you brought yourself or they served you the bottle you brought yourself. You can't get around corkage by serving it yourself because it's not really a fee for a service (oncorking and serving your wine) but rather a BYO fee for the profit Carnival didn't make from selling you the bottle of the heavily marked up wine you (theoretically) would have bought had you not brought your own.

Actually it was horribly inefficient. Each agent had to walk over to the one single box of S&S cards and look for each guest's card. And heaven forbid if they couldn't find your card, that turned into a 5-10 minute ordeal. Check-in started moving much faster when they stopped that mess and started just stamping your boarding pass as checked in so you could (imagine this!) board the ship with the boarding pass you had already printed yourself. That's reason #1. Reason #2 was to preserve the integrity of FTTF by preventing people who weren't FTTF, Platinum, or Diamond from going to their rooms before they time when they were officially ready.

This is only since the restart because they're not having tournaments to use the BOGO tournament entry from the Platinum/Diamond benefits. As much as cash as Carnival Corp. is still bleeding, I'm shocked they're still doing this and they haven't just removed mention of the benefit in the VIFP materials.

For those of you who don't believe what multiple experienced cruisers are telling you or are finding random menus online without bothering to see how long those sailings were, this is an article about cutting out free lobster on short cruises from when it was announced in 2015: https://cruiseradio.net/carnival-cuts-lobster-on-short-cruises/

On one single day, right after the protocols were changed. Not indefinitely. But how long will that pent up demand last, especially when the unvaccinated get on their first post-restart cruise and see what crap Carnival's product has become?

Except that they're adding back for a fee the steak that was previously cut from the (complimentary) MDR brunch menu.

Maybe it's the last sea day instead of the last day. Since they only do MDR breakfast (not brunch) on port days, I can't see there being enough demand for a paid brunch either amongst the minority of passengers not going ashore if the last day is a port day.

$25 at a time🤣

And we have a winner!! That's where the petite filet from the MDR steak and eggs went. Yet another item that used to be included in your fare but that Carnival now charges for.

It varies by ship, including whether you say you play tables or slots, and if you play slots whether that ship's slots have the old or new S&S card readers.

Yes. The part about being able to cash out only the winnings only applies to promotional play uploaded by the casino to your promotional bank, e.g. the $25 Platinum/Diamond FreePlay they're giving since there are no tournaments, if you won FreePlay in a casino drawing or promotion, or if you booked a casino rate that includes FreePlay.

Part of me wonders why Carnival hasn't used COVID as an excuse to discontinue the laundry benefit, i.e. we don't want tol spread germs between passengers.

You'd have to apply the gift card to your S&S account, then when you charge your room on a slot machine that will post as a charge on your S&S account. Carnival will apply your S&S charges against any credits on your S&S account (OBC, refund of excess port taxes, any cash or gift cards you've applied to your S&S account) before charging the credit card you guaranteed your S&S with. But be careful about withdrawing too much too often and cashing out without playing some it on the slots. The casino can systematically identify people doing this to get no-fee cash advances or like you cashing out gift cards and automatically block you from charging more on the slots, in addition the the scolding you may get when you try to cash out at the cage.